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Extra City | centre for contemporary art

Untitled
1964
drawing on paper
courtesy Galerie Erna Hécey, Brussels

Peter Friedl Blow Job
30.05 - 27.07.2008

Extra City | centre for contemporary art
Tulpstraat 79, 2060 Antwerp, Belgium
t / f +32 3 677 16 55
info@extracity.org

http://www.extracity.org

Peter Friedl (1960, based in Berlin) explores the conditions and genres of representation, using strategies of bracketing, exposing, editing, and other contextual transfers. His artistic practice emphasizes the friction between aesthetic and political awareness in the framework of their respective narratives. Throughout his artistic practice runs a deep concern about the language of the “subaltern” – that is, what remains outside or excluded from accepted symbolic systems. With the exhibition Blow Job in Extra City Antwerp, curated by Anselm Franke, Peter Friedl returns to his long-standing interest in theatre and its aesthetics, which was the subject of a large number of essays he wrote in the
early 1980s.

The title Blow Job refers to an Internet project which started in 2001. At the time, Blow Job was set up as an anonymous blog: a brief scenario (“Berlin, 2001”) full of biographical, historical, and fictional references including seven acting characters. Running dialogues, stage directions, or prose insertions could be contributed to the website anonymously.

This trash material, now anachronistic, is the starting point for the present exhibition. Extra City commissioned Peter Friedl to turn it into a definite dramatic text which will be published by Sternberg Press in conjunction with the exhibition. Following Friedl’s previous text-based projects, such as the children’s monologues of Kromme Elleboog and Four or Five Roses or the interviews in Working at Copan, Blow Job raises questions of authorship, institutional practice, and visibility. The text will become the source for realizations and collaborations in various institutional contexts, beginning in São Paulo and Berlin in the fall of 2008.

The background of this commission functions as an organizing principle for a constellation of works in the exhibition, which brings together drawings, photos, and slides from 1964 to the present, some of which have rarely or never been shown before. Also included is the video installation King Kong (2001), shot in Sophiatown on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The film mimics the subtle deconstruction of a video clip, featuring songwriter Daniel Johnston against the backdrop of apartheid history. Rather than being another “retrospective”– a genre Friedl used in recent exhibitions – Blow Job reveals the theatrical as an exhibition and curatorial paradigm.

BIOGRAPHY
Peter Friedl’s work has been exhibited worldwide, including at documenta X (1997) and documenta XII (2007), the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), the 3rd Berlin Biennale (2004), and the 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville (2006). Solo exhibitions include the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (1998); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (1999); Casino Luxembourg, Luxemburg (2001); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2001); Institute for Contemporary Art, Cape Town (2002); Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne-Lyon (2002); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main (2004); Witte de With, centre for contemporary art, Rotterdam (2004); Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2006); and Kunsthalle Basel (2008). In 2006 the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) organized a comprehensive retrospective, which was subsequently shown at Miami Art Central/Miami Art Museum and the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Marseille.

Peter Friedl has been nominated for the Vincent Award 08. The accompanying exhibition runs from 20 June till 30 September 2008 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. http://www.thevincentaward.eu

FILM PROGRAM

FRIDAY 20.06 - 19.00h I Film program compiled and introduced by Peter Friedl, including Germaine Dulac’s La coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928) based on a script by Antonin Artaud; Andy Warhol’s Paul Swan (1965); Richard Foreman’s Strong Medicine (1978); and a film from the Squat Theatre production Any Warhol’s Last Love (1978).

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

CURATED BY: Anselm Franke
DURATION: 30.05 – 27.07. 2008
LOCATION:
Extra City I centre for contemporary art
Tulpstraat 79, 2060 Antwerp, Belgium
t / f +32 3 677 16 55
info@extracity.org I http://www.extracity.org
OPENING HOURS: Wednesday to Sunday 2 – 7 pm | every Thursday open till 8 pm
PRESSCONTACT: Katrien Reist – katrien.reist@extracity.org | tel. 0032 (3) 677 16 55

Shanghai Zendai
Museum of Modern Art

Vibeke Jensen
Night Watch, Shanghai, 2008
Image courtesy of Zendai MoMA, Intrude Project.

Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art presents
Intrude: Art and Life 366

http://www.intrude366.com

Intrude: Art and Life 366 is an ambitious interdisciplinary and cross-cultural public art event organized by the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, China. From January 1st to December 31st 2008, a cultural event will take place everyday somewhere in the city of Shanghai.

One cultural event a day, 366 events a year, Intrude: Art & Life 366 will present global perspectives on art and culture, and bring these closer to the people of the city, intervening in their daily lives by exposing them to exceptional cultural happenings.

In order to present their work differently, artists will explore new concepts, abandoning the pristine white gallery and museum walls so that different cultural experiences can enter the public space.

Intrude: Art & Life 366 was created as a long-term project, continuing beyond the 366 days of events. All of the events will be methodically archived in Zendai MoMA’s archives and presented in the future as touring exhibitions. The Museum also publishes monthly magazines with interviews and essays on the projects to inform a broad range of people on the progress of the project.

Intrude: Art & Life 366 is looking for artists

Intrude:Art and Life 366 is still looking for ambitious and original artists who are willing to intrude in the city of Shanghai. If you have any ideas or projects you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to send us your proposal. All works that can be realized in different public or private spaces (parks, streets, office buildings, shops, squares, etc) as well as internet-based works are welcomed. Artists active in different fields (visual arts, music, theatre, literature, dance, etc.) can submit proposals by filling out the proposal form and submitting it to Zendai MoMA’s Intrude project team. To download the proposal form please visit http://www.intrude366.com or write to intrude366proposals@gmail.com For more info contact Liz Coppens, Project Coordinator (Curatorial Department) at liz.coppens@gmail.com

Past projects

Vibeke Jensen, a Norwegian artists living and working in New York, projected her work ‘Nightwatch’, a video piece developed from a series on surveillance, at different sites all over the city. With a mobile projector, her video showing a big moving eye, was taken all around Shanghai and was projected on bridges, buildings, and monuments.

Making seemingly abstract paintings, Belgian artist Mathieu Staelens bases his work on the lives of others. Handing out bankcards to 3 unemployed people in Shanghai, he gave them permission to spend money on things they needed/wanted, while he himself collected the bank prints and receipts. He then traced those people’s wishes and needs on a map of the city, and translated their routes onto his canvas, mixing paint and organic substances with real information.

Chinese artist Yang Yong confronted a lot of people with gigantic photographs in the subway of Shanghai. Tying to evoke a dialogue between the cities of Shanghai and Shenzen, where the artist originates from, the artist aimed to show different attitudes towards life and dreams.

Israeli Artist Romy Achituv’s landscape Painting consisted of a series of spectacular colourful generative animations projected onto and merged with the structures of an about-to-be demolished old paper-machinery manufacturing factory.

Chinese artist Liu Jin provoked some heated discussions with his life-size naked human angels, sculptures which were hung on buildings in such a way that they seemed to be clinging on desperately. Faced with all the significant changes in the fast developing urban landscape, the hanging figures seemed small and fragile and reflected the current human condition.

Upcoming projects

Yoko Ono will bring part of her solo show to Shanghai and will intrude the city with a series
of billboards.

The young American artist Sean Raspet on the other hand, will present a large scale banner installation, creating a three-dimensional mural of hanging Olympic Games related images printed on vinyl banners.

Motek, an audio-visual collective from Belgium, will bring their ‘Do you us too?’ show, a performance which focuses on the relationship between music and images and in which the musicians create visuals in synergy with music and sound.

Made in Serbia unites 3 different art projects from Serbia who aim to change the stereotypical viewpoints of the country. Shanghai project, In Absentia and the Urtica workshop are reflections on contemporary Serbia seen through the eyes of Serbian artists coming from different cultural backgrounds.

Maider Lopez from Spain will create an urban intervention by staging a trompe l’oeil effect with painted large-sized signs. People will hold and move these signs in such a way that all advertising is erased from the urban landscape.

BFI Southbank Gallery

susan pui san lok
Faster, Higher
30 May - 31 August 2008

http://www.bfi.org.uk/lok

Faster, Higher is staged to coincide with the Beijing Olympics and act as an imaginative precursor to London 2012.

Exploring the visual rhetoric of idealism, unity and aspiration, invoking both the Olympics as spectacle and movement and China’s parallel sports culture, this new commission revolves around material from the BFI National Archive and new footage shot on location in London.

Colour bars and video-graphic countdowns signal different ‘universal’ values and standards, implicating the entwined histories of the Olympics and the moving image, as well as the artist’s points of entry into the archive. The Olympic rings are echoed across multiple screens, through clocks, archers’ targets, lassoes and gymnasts’ hoops, while a series of sequences bring together images, sounds and gestures that may literally or poetically evoke the movement’s motto, citius, altius, fortius – faster,
higher, stronger.

Commissioned by the BFI and Film and Video Umbrella.

Supported by Arts Council England.

BFI Southbank Gallery, BFI Southbank, London SE1

FREE admission